The Vet Work You Never See

Friday, September 25, 2026

Survey finds livestock vets’ food-safety role goes unnoticed

By Paul Nolan, Leslie Stewart & Mary Loggan

Most of what a veterinarian does on a hog barn visit happens quietly. A recent global survey suggests that’s exactly the problem.

Boehringer Ingelheim, working with several international veterinary associations, recently published findings from its Going Beyond campaign, drawing on responses from more than 1,000 veterinary professionals across 51 countries.

The survey asked which parts of veterinary work go most unrecognized by the public, and across every species category, the same theme surfaced: much of the most important work veterinarians do never becomes visible to the people who rely on it.

Among livestock veterinarians in North America, 76 per cent pointed to protecting food-chain safety as the most overlooked part of their job, while 62 per cent cited surveillance work meant to limit the spread of disease between farms. The global livestock results were similar, with 65 and 62 per cent of respondents identifying those same two areas.

The numbers behind that invisibility are sizable. Livestock veterinary care underpins roughly 34 per cent of the global food protein supply, the survey found, and about 60 per cent of human infectious diseases are known to pass between animals and people. Roughly 70 per cent of emerging diseases are believed to originate in animals — one reason early detection on farms carries consequences well beyond the barn door.

“Livestock veterinarians are guardians of our food supply and frontline defenders against the diseases that can cross from animals to people, yet this role is rarely visible to the public who depend on it most,” says Arcangelo Gentile, president of the World Association for Buiatrics. He says recognizing that role isn’t just about professional pride — it’s tied to whether the profession can attract and retain enough veterinarians to keep up with growing demands on food security and public health.

That expertise takes years to build. Becoming a veterinarian in Canada typically requires six to eight years of post-secondary education, including undergraduate or college studies and a veterinary degree, and specialists complete three to four additional years of advanced training. The decisions made during a routine farm visit, in other words, draw on more than a decade of education and clinical experience, even when the visit itself looks uneventful.

“Veterinary professionals make decisions every day that affect far more than the animals in their care, from the people who love and depend on them to the food and public health systems that keep communities healthy,” says Fabio Barone, vice-president of animal health at Boehringer Ingelheim Canada.

“The Going Beyond survey puts data behind what the animal health community has long known: some of veterinary medicine’s most essential contributions happen quietly and are often overlooked.”

Much of veterinary care, across every species the survey covered, is preventive by design — early intervention and careful observation meant to head off problems before they escalate. The survey’s equine and companion-animal results fall outside this magazine’s usual territory, but they pointed to the same pattern found in livestock medicine: the veterinarians most consistently praised by owners and producers are often the ones whose interventions prevented a crisis nobody ever saw coming.

For hog producers, that’s a familiar dynamic. A herd health program that’s working well tends to look, from the outside, like nothing is happening at all.

The survey was conducted in March and April 2026 and included 175 qualifying veterinary professionals from Canada, the United States, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, with results broken out by species focus. The Going Beyond campaign, first launched for World Veterinary Day in 2024, is run by Boehringer Ingelheim in cooperation with the World Small Animal Veterinary Association, the World Association for Buiatrics, the American Association of Equine Practitioners, the American Association of Swine Veterinarians and other veterinary organizations. BP